A new international survey on donor attitudes suggestswidespread popular support for committing funds to end global hunger.In nearly all of the 20 countries polled, alarge majority of respondents said they are willing to contribute necessaryfunds to cut hunger and poverty in half by 2015.That?s the target for fulfilling this commitment, outlined eightyears ago as one of the UN?s so-called Millennium Development Goals(MDGs).
Thenew survey, issued Wednesday on the eve of the UN World Food Day annualobservance, was completed in August, just before the US home mortgage crunchtriggered a global economic slowdown.But World Public Opinion lead researcher Clay Ramsay, who carried outthe study for the Washington-based Program for International Policy Attitudes(PIPA), says that despite thetime lag, the findings overwhelmingly reinforce the view that developed nationshave a moral responsibility to help reduce hunger and severe poverty in poorcountries.
?Wedid our poll before the financial crisis really became as dramatic as ithas.However, it?s clear that acrossall of these countries that would be primary contributors to this kind of aneffort to have the Millennium Development Goal be realized ? countries likeFrance, Italy, Britain, Germany ? the lower-income people, definitely feel thepinch.Nonetheless, large majorities inall these countries were willing to contribute a share, helping out thepoorest,? he said.
Tohelp respondents in every country get a quantitative idea of how much of apersonal annual contribution they would need to contribute to curb starvationby 2015, the pollsters used an accepted World Bank estimate of $39 billion anddivided it proportionally according to the Gross Domestic Products (GDP) andpopulation sizes of the countries being polled.Ramsay says each respondent was given a figure indicating howmuch each citizen of a country would be asked to contribute annually in orderto reduce world hunger dramatically.
?Forinstance, Americans were asked to give $56 a person.People in Turkey were asked to give $11 a person.And the difference relates to the size oftheir economies,? Ramsay explained.Other annual amounts proposed to donors of other nations includedBritain, $49; France, $45; Germany, $43; Italy, $39; South Korea, $23; andRussia, $11.Ramsay says that the WorldPublic Opinion pollsters decided to include Russia in its study ?because itsgovernment is studying the prospect of becoming an aid-giver in thefuture.?Although the breakdown on aper person basis varied from country to country, Ramsay points out that theattitudes matched up similarly across countries, strongly supporting helpingthe poor.
?Oneof the reasons we wanted to do this poll was to show worldwide something thatwe have shown in polling in the US in the past, which is that there is a senseof a moral obligation to do what they can to contribute to a solution of theproblem, understanding that the US can?t do it alone and, in fact, all of thedeveloped countries can?t do it alone,? he pointed out.
Thursdayin Rome, World Food Program director Jacques Diouf remarked that donorcountries have made good on only 10 percent of a $22 billion aid packagepledged for this year to help starving nations. He and others urged wealthynations not to cancel aid or limit trade in ways that hurt poor countries.While US and European financial institutionsbegin to implementsubstantiallylarger-scale government rescue commitments to remedy the current economiccrisis, Ramsay says the process of galvanizing public consensus behind suchcomplex, multi-faceted initiatives takes significant time to develop.In contrast, he believes his new poll bearsout that the public mind-set across cultures firmly accepts the moralresponsibility for advanced societies to help the poor fight hunger andpoverty.
?I?d say that there is definitelystronger and deeper public consensus in favor of doing what can be done in anorganized plan to help the poorest than there is for the efforts to stem thefinancial crisis so far, though I do think that over time, those efforts willgather more support rather than less,? he predicts.